Monthly Archives: December 2013

Gender discrimination in the workplace is a controversial topic and some argue that talking about it might over-emphasize the problem and prevent women from entering fields in which they are under-represented. In fact, since starting this blog, we have received some comments along these lines on our posts ourselves, for example when talking about the glass cliff. These concerns are certainly not unjustified. However, knowing about gender discrimination might also help girls and women as it shows them that negative feedback that they might have received may not be due to their lack of skill or talent, but due to gender discrimination. So talking about gender discrimination seems to be a double-edged sword. But what does the literature have to say about this matter?

Weisgram and Bigler were intrigued by this debate and investigated how providing girls with information about gender discrimination in science influences their attitudes towards and interest in a career in science. Two groups of middle school aged girls took part in a one hour session with the aim of sparking their interest in computer science. After this, one of the groups also attended a session on historic and contemporary gender discrimination in scientific fields. The effects of the one hour session in itself proved to be rather disappointing. The girls were neither more interested in a scientific career nor did they feel more confident in their scientific abilities. What is more, after the intervention they had stronger beliefs that men were better at science than women. Interestingly, this was quite different for those girls who had been taught about gender discrimination: They felt more confident about their scientific abilities and had a higher opinion on science in general. However, their interest in science did not change.

Nevertheless, although the positive effects were limited, this study suggests that making barriers and obstacles that women face explicit does not have the suspected negative effects.

Our images of “the doctor” or “the scientist” as middle aged or older white men are formed early on and the lack of visibility of the women of those fields in text books and education in general is certainly not helping in attracting girls into these disciplines.

Luckily it seems that independent creators of educational content, for example on YouTube, are not following this trend. There are some great educational resources by women in STEM/M and about women in STEM/M out there and I’d like to share some of them with you this week – feel free to share them with your kids, your friends’ kids or anyone who might benefit from them. I shall go back to posting about research and the like in my next post.

There are a number of studies about gender differences of surgeons out there – but are there gender differences in surgeons’ spouses? Although we have never asked ourselves this question before, we stumbled across a survey which investigated just this and thought it quite interesting. After all, spousal support is without a doubt an important factor in career satisfaction or life satisfaction more generally.

Interestingly, there was no gender difference in percentage of respondents who had children or in number of children. The myth of the childless career woman thus seems to be just that – a myth. There was, however, a gender difference in whether or not spouses had a job outside of the home. While 88% of male spouses worked outside of the home, only 55% of female spouses did so. Both male and female spouses indicated that they would be happier if their spouse worked less. Maybe unsurprisingly female spouses indicated that they carried most of the responsibilities for home and childcare whereas this was not the case for male spouses – and this held true regardless of the working hours of the spouse. This is problematic, as it indicates that female surgeons have an overall higher workload than their male counterparts – and while a number of initiatives aim at improving work conditions for women at work, the differential work load outside of the workplace remains largely unaddressed.

Women in fields in which they are under-represented often name the lack of female role models as a barrier in their careers. Yet, research often finds that the successful women who are available are often rejected. They are seen as pushy, overly masculine and cold and generally not as someone most women can identify with – even when no information indicating these traits is given. But why is that?

A study by Parks-Stamm and colleagues suggests that this might be a strategy to protect our beliefs about our own competence. In other words, if we saw a successful woman as highly competent and on top of that as nice and likable, this might undermine our own confidence. After all, how are we supposed to compete with that? The authors tested this idea by presenting men and women with information about a highly successful woman. In some cases, this woman was described as warm and likable, whereas in other cases no such information was given. Unsurprisingly, both men and women in the former condition described her as less pushy and cold than those in the latter condition. What was interesting, however, was that those women who had been told that the successful target was warm and nice, rated their own competence as lower compared to those who were able to penalise the potential role model.

So what does this mean? Should successful women be presented as unlikable and cold? Certainly not. It is, however, important, that they are described in ways that make them seem attainable. Evidence for this claim comes from a second study by the authors in which they show that the negative effect of preventing women from penalising the role model disappears when they are given positive information about their own future success.